Here's a mostly complete list of gameplay changes for 1.2. If you want something explained or justified feel free to ask, though for most of the number tweaks the answer is likely to amount to "it was a judgement call based on feedback and how the game was being played". At this point it's highly unlikely that anything else major (e.g. something getting added or removed) is going to change, but the beta period will most likely lead to some minor adjustments. See the following post for some preemptive explanations.

Distances are given in game units, times are given in milliseconds except where noted, regen rates are in health per second.

General

marked deconstruction

instead of instantly removing structures, deconstruct will now mark them as no longer needed

marked structures will be automatically removed when more build points are needed or when a marked structure is blocking the placement of a new structure

when reclaiming build points for a new structure, the first marked structure of the same type will be taken down; if none are marked, structures will be taken down in the order they were marked

unpowered human structures will be removed immediately instead of marked (since they use no build points to be reclaimed)

structures destroyed by enemy players will not immediately become available for reuse, but instead enter a queue

build points will gradually leave the queue to become available again, at a rate proportional to the amount of points in the queue

the longest number of seconds between returning build points (i.e. when only 1 point is in the queue) is governed by g_HumanQueueTime and g_AlienQueueTime (default 8 and 12, respectively)

for humans, build point queuing only applies to structures powered directly by the reactor (including repeaters themselves), and only while the reactor is actually alive (see the section on zone build points under Repeater)

the timer for complimentary funds (governed now by g_freeKillPeriod, default 2 minutes) no longer resets on death nor on earning funds from other sources

omgwtfhovelThis was a matter of editing. Hovels served no purpose not covered by other structures, and we couldn't think of and didn't receive any good ideas for it, so I decided the best course of action was removing it altogether. Think of it as an extra model for modders to use.

What's with the weird alien regen values?Alien health doesn't return in chunks one a second at a time anymore, it now returns one point at a time at varying intervals. Since this allows for greater precision in defining regen values, I defined them in terms of percentage of a class's max health per second:

Granger - 4%

Dretch - 5%

Basilisk - 3% (not counting their healing auras)

Marauder - 3%

Dragoon - 3%

Tyrant - 2.5%

Attack width? Height? Repeat?Width and height are basically how accurate you have to be in order to hit with a melee attack. For most attacks the width is used for both the horizontal and vertical axes, but the tyrant slash and painsaw now have a separate vertical value so that tyrants can still hit teles/medis with their shorter range and battlesuits can now finally saw dretches. Repeat is how long you're forced to wait between attacks, so lower means you can fire/slash/etc. more frequently.

Those non-locational damage modifiers make no sense.Well, they make more sense than they did before. I didn't want any armour to be of wildly different value for locational and non-locational damage so we made the formula for non-locational damage take into account what regions a piece of armour covers. Light armour, for example, leaves you vulnerable to non-locational damage because it doesn't cover your head, so I didn't think it was appropriate that it quadrupled the number of pounces you could take before dying. And now a battlesuit is actually better than wearing light armour with a helmet. Crouching produces different modifiers because light armour and helmet have different locational modifiers/coverage when crouching (the old formula just averaged everything together). I felt that having a formula that used the locational modifiers was better than arbitrarily maintaining two different sets of numbers.

Why no fund reward for destroying structures?The tradeoff with awarding funds for structures is that it allows builders to feed, badly. At one point in development we awarded funds for all structures with the hope that it would encourage players to be more aggressive, but it didn't really accomplish that enough to warrant severely punishing teams for trying to build forward, or for just trying non-standard bases.We might have kept funds for spawns/reactor/om, but the choice seemed arbitrary. Overmind/reactor might be equivalent enough to each other, but if the reactor goes down it's very unlikely that the 3 frags it'd award would make a difference in the outcome of the game. Eggs and telenodes are not equivalent since aliens need to put eggs in harm's way if they want forward bases. I could maybe see doing it for repeaters in addition to eggs and telenodes, but I'd rather see builders unafraid of being aggressive (especially since one successfully aggressive builder can set up a platform for numerous teammates to go on offense, as opposed to giving one reward to one attacker for killing an enemy structure).

If hovel works only if an OM is up, I don't really think it will encourage egg spaming.Because first, you have to build an egg, than an hovel (that is long to build), then build a second hovel. An human with psaw can destroy the Overmind if he found it before the second hovel is built.

The tradeoff with awarding funds for structures is that it allows builders to feed, badly. At one point in development we awarded funds for all structures with the hope that it would encourage players to be more aggressive, but it didn't really accomplish that enough to warrant severely punishing teams for trying to build forward, or for just trying non-standard bases.

We might have kept funds for spawns/reactor/om, but the choice seemed arbitrary. Overmind/reactor might be equivalent enough to each other, but if the reactor goes down it's very unlikely that the 3 frags it'd award would make a difference in the outcome of the game. Eggs and telenodes are not equivalent since aliens need to put eggs in harm's way if they want forward bases. I could maybe see doing it for repeaters in addition to eggs and telenodes, but I'd rather see builders unafraid of being aggressive (especially since one successfully aggressive builder can set up a platform for numerous teammates to go on offense, as opposed to giving one reward to one attacker for killing an enemy structure).

Making our grangars hovelless is really mean, but yeah, it was almost always used as free barricade. It also allowed builders to go to places where they shouldn't be, or leave the map altogether (at atcs, niveus, thanatos, and many, many more).

i would've liked some form of fueled/timed jetpack use to be included to stop people who stay in air constantly in places where it is next to impossible to get them down. the hovels only use was to glitch im happy its gone.

About the hovel, try it before you say "no it makes for retarted egghunting". I know of at least one server that has it, and it's mainly used for aliens to switch quickly between attack/defense, or get tyrants to previously unreachable spots such as the higher platform in arachnid2.

About the hovel, try it before you say "no it makes for retarted egghunting". I know of at least one server that has it, and it's mainly used for aliens to switch quickly between attack/defense, or get tyrants to previously unreachable spots such as the higher platform in arachnid2.

It's not just egghunting. Aliens already have a significant advantage over humans in terms of mobility -- switching between attack and defense is already easier for them than for humans. I don't think increasing that advantage would benefit the game.

i would've liked some form of fueled/timed jetpack use to be included to stop people who stay in air constantly in places where it is next to impossible to get them down.

This is a very common request, but I disagree that skycamping is a problem. It's useful sometimes -- and I want to keep it useful sometimes -- but people that do nothing but sit in the air simply don't contribute as much to their team as they could by doing other things. The proper response is to ignore them and go attack their base. I'm sure there are maps for which it really is a significant problem, but it's also possible to turn other benign things into major problems with questionable map design.

Nice, really nice. This should stop people to use only dretch/goon till s3.Just a question, what is "repeat"? Is it the time between two attacks? I don't understand well.For hovel, I always thought this building was a non-sense so...For jet-campers, I already ignore them.I'm wondering, when 1.2 will be officially released, will the servers display their version in serverlist? Like "base1.2" instead of "base" or something?I think it's important to being able to know what version the server is running without using the Server Info thing.

1.2 will have a new client, and has changed the network protocol.So you will only see servers for the client you are running.

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Any maps not in the MG repo? Email me or come to irc.freenode.net/#mg.--My words are mine and mine alone. I can't speak for anyone else, and there is no one who can speak for me. If I ever make a post that gives the opinions or positions of other users or groups, then they will be clearly labeled as such.I'm disappointed that people's past actions have forced me to state what should be obvious.I am not a dev. Nothing I say counts for anything.

EDIT: Should point out that this is just balance changes, lots of other things that have already gotten into trunk that aren't on this list. (EG voip and ipv6 and a million bug fixes)

« Last Edit: September 13, 2009, 08:03:56 PM by David »

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Any maps not in the MG repo? Email me or come to irc.freenode.net/#mg.--My words are mine and mine alone. I can't speak for anyone else, and there is no one who can speak for me. If I ever make a post that gives the opinions or positions of other users or groups, then they will be clearly labeled as such.I'm disappointed that people's past actions have forced me to state what should be obvious.I am not a dev. Nothing I say counts for anything.

HovelTake away it from alien team is not so good cause aliens are an alien race so have strange structures, like hovel. And use it to go out from map , bah, just in some boring or funny games, not in normal.

About HumansDodge = s**t, sorry but i dont really like it.Ckit is now useful Flamer MUST take damage to you Lucifer cannon is really overpoweredTurrets have a lot of damage and basilisk grab was useful to help mates to run away from them.Tesla are really more useful now DC mmhh i have doubts about its helpRepetears at stage 1 is not funny.

About AliensReally depowered.

About Servers and clientsI hope new version servers can be listed in old clients too.

End of My Opinion.

I think that a larger collaboration and more discussions between devs and players in the whole Tremulous Universe will help you and us to reach better results. Anyway thanks for your work guys.

@ghostisback: The client will determine what resources you can run the game with. That's code, models, animations, and anything regarding how the engine runs (physics calculations, map entities, etc). You will not be able to run 1.2 on the 1.1 client since 1.2 brings a lot of new things that are unavailable to 1.1.

@ghostisback: The client will determine what resources you can run the game with. That's code, models, animations, and anything regarding how the engine runs (physics calculations, map entities, etc). You will not be able to run 1.2 on the 1.1 engine since 1.2 brings a lot of new things that are unavailable to 1.1.

It's the same engine...

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Bucket: [You hear the distant howl of a coyote losing at Counterstrike.]

@ghostisback: The client will determine what resources you can run the game with. That's code, models, animations, and anything regarding how the engine runs (physics calculations, map entities, etc). You will not be able to run 1.2 on the 1.1 engine since 1.2 brings a lot of new things that are unavailable to 1.1.

It's the same engine...

Blah blah blah. Typo. Point is, 1.2 brings new things to the table that 1.1 doesn't support. It'd be like trying to play Trem on Nexuiz.

Mostly the same. There are a few small changes (eg net code) that means that 1.2 and 1.1 wont be compatible.Thus all the crap with backports.

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Any maps not in the MG repo? Email me or come to irc.freenode.net/#mg.--My words are mine and mine alone. I can't speak for anyone else, and there is no one who can speak for me. If I ever make a post that gives the opinions or positions of other users or groups, then they will be clearly labeled as such.I'm disappointed that people's past actions have forced me to state what should be obvious.I am not a dev. Nothing I say counts for anything.

Any maps not in the MG repo? Email me or come to irc.freenode.net/#mg.--My words are mine and mine alone. I can't speak for anyone else, and there is no one who can speak for me. If I ever make a post that gives the opinions or positions of other users or groups, then they will be clearly labeled as such.I'm disappointed that people's past actions have forced me to state what should be obvious.I am not a dev. Nothing I say counts for anything.

"unpowered human structures will be removed immediately" should be "will be removed instead of marked" to make it less arbitrary.Does complimentary funds timer reset to max when u earn less then the amount u would get from it?Building: "the HUD indicator is now 5 seconds per slice for both teams" you mean 2.5?Basi: "slash and grab range increased to compensate bounding box increase over regular basilisk (+3 to regular values)" I guess that only works if you are looking straight, but diagonally to corner of bbox increase is 5.19. Same for goons; 3.46 for maras.Tyrant trample: "can longer be charged by walking into a wall" you mean "no longer"? And what is minimum height to kill RC in 1 hit? And what is the max alien regen modifier? x3x3=x9? in base near booster and +basi?Booster poison: "lasts 10 seconds" should be "damage lasts 10 seconds"What about building eggs on walls?Hovelport wouldn't increase alien mobility much if only grangers can use it...Backwards dodge is longer then avg strafejump :,( meaning mappers can't add simple strafe jump obstacles for humans.